Controversial - The way top Indian scientist is treated

US- based Indian scientist Shiva Ayyadurai has claimed that he was hounded out of the country after he raised questions about the widespread corruption practices at Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CISR) during the UPA-2 government. Ayyadurai, who says that he is the inventor of e-mail, had even written to the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office regarding the corruption and suppression of innovation at CISR. However, he claims that the government took no action.

First I would going to thrash him for going to most stupid channel Times Now.
Now Second BJP is not very different in Congress in corruption as former had got very less chance to rule.
BJP itself grilled AIIMS corruption whistleblower former VC Chaturvedi for Pleasing J.P. Nadda & lated made J.P. Nadda health minister.
For Science sake BJP government reduce total R&D budget in a developing country like India instead of increasing .
So, this man should keep quiet , settle in USA or Europe permanently.

First I would going to thrash him for going to most stupid channel Times Now.
Now Second BJP is not very different in Congress in corruption as former had got very less chance to rule.
BJP itself grilled AIIMS corruption whistleblower former VC Chaturvedi for Pleasing J.P. Nadda & lated made J.P. Nadda health minister.
For Science sake BJP government reduce total R&D budget in a developing country like India instead of increasing .
So, this man should keep quiet , settle in USA or Europe permanently.

Click to expand...

I am looking forward to that. In fact all such people should migrate to Europe and usa . we really could do better with only people who want to work for India instead of bitch about it.

Regarding op , yep corruption plagues the govt offices everywhere. Which is exactly why we need to get rid of the govt agencies which are non essential. All they do is waste tax money and sit on their asses

US- based Indian scientist Shiva Ayyadurai has claimed that he was hounded out of the country after he raised questions about the widespread corruption practices at Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CISR) during the UPA-2 government. Ayyadurai, who says that he is the inventor of e-mail, had even written to the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office regarding the corruption and suppression of innovation at CISR. However, he claims that the government took no action.

The man in question,Shiva Ayyudurai, is a fraud. He claims to have invented email. In reality all he did was create a software which could send messages in a network(something which had already been done way before in 1968) and then he called it EMAIL. He got a copyright(not a patent) under the name EMAIL. This is like a person inventing the already invented aeroplane and getting a copyright under the name AEROPLANE. Doing such a thing does not make that person the aeroplane inventor ahead of the Wright brothers. Infact here is a big controversy surrounding his tall claims. You should check the Wiki out.

Even TIMES and the other US newspaper fell for his claims. The truth is that no single person can lay claim to the title of being the inventor of email. There were small developments which finally led to the creation of modern email. There were many contributors to the development like Ray Tomlinson etc.

Also what makes this man a greater fraud is that he owns thousand of domain names and thus spreads his claims about being the inventor of email through these sites. When he came to India he did not do any work and instead plotted against his supervisors. It was good that he was booted out.

How The Guy Who Didn't Invent Email Got Memorialized In The Press & The Smithsonian As The Inventor Of Email

Late last week, the Washington Post reported that The Smithsonian had acquired "tapes, documentation, copyrights, and over 50,000 lines of code from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who both the Smithsonian and the Washington Post insisted was the "inventor of e-mail." There's just one problem with this: It's not actually true. Lots of internet old-timers quickly started to speak out against this, especially on Dave Farber's Interesting People email list, where they highlighted howit's just not true. As is nicely summarized on Wikipedia's talk page about Ayyadurai, he was responsible for "merely inventing an email management system that he named EMAIL," which came long after email itself. The Washington Post eventually offered the following "clarification":Clarification: A number of readers have accurately pointed out that electronic messaging predates V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai’s work in 1978. However, Ayyadurai holds the copyright to the computer program called "email," establishing him as the creator of the “computer program for [an] electronic mail system” with that name, according to the U.S. Copyright Office.Except... that "clarification" seems to confuse copyright with patents. Copyright is only over the specific copyrightable work created -- which would be the specific code he used. It does not, in any way, establish him as "the creator" of "the" electronic mail system -- merely an electronic mail system -- and hardly the first one. I could write some sort of email management software tomorrow and copyright that... and it would no more make me an "inventor" of email than Ayyadurai.

There's a detailed history of email over at the NetHistory site, and you'll note that Ayyadurai doesn't warrant a mention -- which isn't surprising since his work comes way after most of the important stuff was done. Thomas Haigh sent a detailed email to the SIGCIS list, breaking down what happened. Apparently, Time Magazine ran a profile of Ayyadurai a few months back, calling him "the man who invented email," which resulted in the Smithsonian's interest. But even that article notes at the beginning that Ayyadurai actually just holds a copyright on EMAIL, rather than email itself. It even asks about the fact that Ray Tomlinson is often credited as being the inventor of email -- and his efforts came much earlier.

Either way, it appears that Ayyadurai has played up this idea that he's the inventor of email, despite little to back that up (apparently frustrating many people who actually know the history). Yes, he copyrighted a particular bit of code, but there's little to support the idea that he had very much to do with "the invention of email" in any way. But, that's not what the Washington Post (or, apparently, the Smithsonian) will tell you...

Statement from the National Museum of American History: Collection of Materials from V.A. Shiva Ayyudurai

February 23, 2012
On Feb. 16, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History collected a selection of materials from Shiva Ayyadurai of MIT. In accepting these objects, the museum did not claim that Ayyadurai was “the inventor of email,” as some press accounts have alleged.

Exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call “email,” predates the work of Ayyadurai. However, the museum found that Ayyadurai’s materials served as signposts to several stories about the American experience. The objects collected include: two program printouts, two tape cassettes, a reel of computer tape and a variety of other materials related to an electronic mail program Ayyadurai developed for the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey as a high school student at Livingston High School in Livingston, N.J., in 1979. He continued to maintain that program for a few years as an MIT undergraduate. The museum found the materials historically interesting and worth collecting for several reasons:

One important story these materials document relates to computer education. Personal computers had begun to enter American homes in the late 1970s, but they were expensive, untrustworthy and not very powerful. To introduce students to computing, the U.S. government, private foundations and universities combined to fund and staff summer programs for high school students. Ayyadurai participated in such a program at New York University’s Courant Institute in summer 1978, where he had an intense introduction to programming. He gave the museum a few documents relating to this experience.

A second story relates to the role of computers in medicine. Thus far, most scholarship in the area has focused on the role of computers in medical research and instrumentation. However, these materials document an effort to innovate in medical communication systems. In 1979, Ayyadurai worked under the supervision of Leslie P. Michelson of the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry to design and implement a customized electronic mail system for the research staff of the medical school, who used an HP1000 minicomputer. Most of the documents he gave to the museum relate to this work. They include a printout of his FORTRAN program, which he named “EMAIL,” as well as documents used to explain this new way of communicating with staff and an example of a request for debugging. The EMAIL project proved sufficiently successful for Ayyadurai to use it as the basis of a Westinghouse Science Talent Search project prepared in 1980. The donation also included materials relating to this award.

At the time Ayyadurai’s work was done, computer software could not be patented. However, in 1982, he took out a copyright registration for his “EMAIL” program, as well as the related user’s manual. Two years later he copyrighted an improved system, “EMS,” that included not only a version of “EMAIL,” but several other programs. He has given the copyright documents to the Smithsonian, as well as a printout of the new form of EMAIL.

Many innovations are conceived independently in different settings. Historians who have documented the early history of electronic messaging have largely focused on the use of large networked computers, especially those linked to the ARPANET in the early 1970s. Ayyadurai’s story reveals a contrasting approach, focusing on communicating via linked computer terminals in an ordinary office situation. The system was localized, linking only three campuses rather than multiple large institutions. It was a small enterprise, rather than a big enterprise story.

Shiva Ayyadurai, pictured above, is a shimmering intellectual. He holds fourdegrees from MIT (where he lectures), numerous patents, honors, and awards. He also says he invented email, and there's a global conspiracy against him. Guess which one of these statements is true.

In 1978, a precocious 14-year-old from New Jersey invented email. You can see him doing it in the photo at the top right of your screen—the kid glued to his monitor. In that picture, he's busy showing off his creation—a way for office staff to message each other via computer. As he's happy to gab to theWashington Post, which recently ran a profile of him, Ayyadurai was a teen wonder who invented the electronic messaging system with which we all communicate, back in 1978. Ayyadurai's collection of "historical documents" is now to be interred at the Smithsonian, the Post reported, laid gloriously on the pillar of American history alongside artifacts of Occidental Civilzation such as Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet, Thomas Jefferson's Bible, and a 1903 Winton, "the first car driven across the United States." Ayyadurai is about to become more than just a gifted programmer and Professional Smart Man, but a historical figure. All of this leading up to a plum book deal with Norton, proclaiming his place in history as the upstart inventor of email itself.

But why have you never heard of him? Probably because there's precious little evidence that Ayyadurai came remotely close to inventing email, beyond a few misleading childhood documents and a US Copyright form of dubious weight. This was enough to convince the Washington Post and Smithsonian? Before you could even finish the Post's ode, Emi Kolawole, the reporter behind the piece, issued a stumbling correction:

A number of readers have accurately pointed out that electronic messaging predates V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai's work in 1978. However, Ayyadurai holds the copyright to the computer program called"email," establishing him as the creator of the "computer program for [an] electronic mail system" with that name, according to the U.S. Copyright Office.
Well, that's a rather different claim to fame entirely, isn't it? After weposted incredulously, Ayyadurai's PR rep was quick to rally us toward his cause—and the case was urgent. Not only was Ayyadurai desperate to set the record straight, but there was a tale of globalization and woe that explained the detractors. Ayyadurai wasn't being accused of lying about inventing email because hadn't invented it; he was the victim of international character assassination. This goes all the way to the top.

In 2009, Ayyadurai worked for the Indian government, helping to run CSIR, a national R&D incubator tasked with finding homegrown patents and turning them into national high tech moneymakers. According to Ayyadurai, the center, with its billions of dollars to spend, was as corrupt as you'd imagine an R&D incubator in a developing country would be. Dissent was verboten, patents were plagiarized, and the few ideas of worth were rounded up laid fallow. When someone tried to speak up, they were canned. Meanwhile, plush villas, fat salaries, and state-provided cars were doled out to scientists within the organization on the dime of the Indian people.

Ayyadurai couldn't sit idly by while this happened. He admonished his management in a letter he circulated within CSIR, calling for freedom of speech among colleagues. The Indian government clamped down immediately: He was banned from further communiques, promptly fired, evicted from his government housing, and urged to flee the country, lest his life and family be harmed. Phone calls of warning and threat were persistent, he says.
So Ayyadurai did flee, returning to MIT, where he's generally described by his colleagues as a nut and fraud—the terms "asshole," and "loon" were tossed around freely by professors who were happy to talk about their coworker but prefer to remain anonymous. "Don't know him, but [he] didn't invent email. If he claims to have done so he's a dick," said one MIT brain.

Ayyadurai is convinced the Indian government isn't through with him. He claims that it hired a team of "bloggers" and PR hatchet men to smear him across the internet. Target number one? His claim to be the father of email.

On the phone, Ayyadurai comes off as kind, a man of nervous tact. But it also absolutely feels like trying to sell you something that's just not sticking—a sort of mainframe Willy Loman. At publications he's duped into letting him opine unfettered, he's email's inventor, through and through. He also owns dozens of immodest domains to that point—InventorOfEmail.com, DrEmail.com,EmailInventor.com—you get the point. No? Well Ayyadura has literally 100 more sites (103 in total) dedicated to making sure you do.

But press Ayyadurai, and he gets desperate, as his entire faux-fame rests upon semantic tricks, falsehoods, and a misinformation campaign.

Shiva Ayyadurai didn't invent email—he created "EMAIL," an electronic mail system implemented at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. It's doubtful he realized it as a little teen, but laying claim to the name of a product that's the generic term for a universal technology gives you acres of weasel room. But creating a type of airplane named AIRPLANE doesn't make you Wilbur Wright.

The actual pioneers of email were breaking new ground more than a decade before Ayyadurai concocted his dental memo system. Electronic mail predates Ayyadurai's ability to spell, let alone code. Ray Tomlinson is best known for having sent the first text letter between two computers on ARPANET in '71—y'know, an email. He also picked out the @ sign. A modest career. And despite Ayyadurai's insistence that, at the very least, he was the first to make use of the To/From/CC/BCC/etc fields we still use in Gmail today, this too is a personal fantasy. Tomlinson, who began working on early inter-computer messaging when Ayyadurai was a year old, explained to us how he became well-versed with these linchpins of modern email years before Ayyadurai drew them up on his own:

[We] had most of the headers needed to deliver the message (to:, cc:, etc.) as well as identifying the sender (from and when the message was sent (date and what the message was about. I chose the Latin word "re" meaning "about" for this. This apparently too obscure and was replaced with "subject:". However, "re:" is still use in the subject field to refer to the subject of the message to which the message is a reply. RFC 561 documents the headers as of 1973. Before that the standard was de facto. You could include any header you wanted in a message, but you had better use to:, cc:, etc. if you wanted the receiving program to understand.

These email underpinnings were further cemented in 1977's RFC 733, a foundational document of what became the internet itself—a full year before Ayyadurai's EMAIL project.

It was rough around the edges, but it was email. The work of Tomlinson and his peers was limited, but so too was the internet—and both exploded together. But ask Ayyadurai, and he dismisses it all—these messages weren't email, but "messages" and nothing more, relegated to some inferior class of communications that he compares to everyday "text messaging and morse code." It was all just sloppy streams of letters until he made EMAIL—and only then did the system behind Gmail, BlackBerry, and every computer on the planet see light.

But Ayyadurai's claim that he revolutionized how those messages are sent isn't uncontested either. Dave Crocker, another eminent figure in the history of actual email, calls Ayyadurai's posturing "theatrical," rattling off a fat list of email clients—MSG, SNDMSG, HERMES, MS—that did pretty much what EMAIL did, years and years before Ayyadurai started coding. "For a 14 year old his work was impressive," Crocker told us over the phone. "What he's saying about it now as a much older adult is also impressive—but in a very different way."

It's possible Ayyadurai was the first to come up with the term "EMAIL." That alone would be a feat. "In 1971, we called them 'messages,'" explains Tomlinson, a man so accomplished he can casually mention such things. But even that claim is tenuous, as Crocker points to a scholarly journal titled "EMMS; Electronic Mail and Message Systems." It was published a year before Ayyadurai did anything. "Newsletters for a topic don't usually start before the topic has been invented," says Crocker.

It's also possible the idea of copying decades-old paper standbys like "blind carbon copy" occurred to Ayyadurai independently of ARPA's work, and that he put it together in a friendly software package. But that's about as much as Ayyadurai has on his side, PR team and media credulity notwithstanding. The fact is that the labors of people like Tomlinson and Crocker are the monkey to your Gmail's homo sapiens, explains Tomlinson: "Email has evolved — FTP is no longer used to transport email. Additional media may be used instead of plain text. Messages are stored in a myriad of ways — Gmail stores messages in databases on huge server farms, messages on my end are stored in files on an IMAP server, etc., but the essence, even the at-sign, remains the same." That explanation? The words of an "elite group of people who think they own innovation," according to Ayyadurai.

Except they have history on their side. They need no aggrandizement, no TIMEarticle, no need to take the Washington Post on a ride, no baseless Smithsonian tribute (the museum declined to comment on Ayyadurai's false apotheosis). They've done their work. But anyone who cares about the history of the astoundingly clever and complex things we use daily might suffer from Ayyadurai's ego campaign. Ayyadurai is free to self-promote—and he's doing a hell of a job—but when he delves into revisionism, it's a rare ego trip we shouldn't let slide.

So this Shiva guy is busy fooling the Indian govt and the American media. The truth is that real geniuses like our RBI governor never have any problem with the govt. Dr. Raghuram Rajan on the other hand has no problem working with the bureaucracy.

Personally I have heard about Ray Tomlinson and ARPANET(from books written by Indian and foreign authors). It was only after a few Facebook posts and the internet rumors started flying that I came to know about Shiva Ayyudurai.

The fact remains that the all powerful bureaucracy that the Angrej left behind to foul their Jewel in the Crown, has been an impediment to progress and recognition. Musharraf had tried to reform this but they are back to square one under political regimes. Our Gen Ershad also tried but ended up with more mess. Sheikh Mujib had a proper plan but was killed the night before that could be launched.

US patented many stuff which was Indian but now you can't do anything since copyright is with US.Even some Yog poses etc are now patented.

Issue is that he exposed corruption/politics/feudal crap in the system where Scientists could not excel.The reason India has huge brain drain is because of this crap.The reason great brain wanna go to the West.

Now when some established Indian comes back to India he faces the same age old issue and bitches about it.

US patented many stuff which was Indian but now you can't do anything since copyright is with US.Even some Yog poses etc are now patented.

Issue is that he exposed corruption/politics/feudal crap in the system where Scientists could not excel.The reason India has huge brain drain is because of this crap.The reason great brain wanna go to the West.

Now when some established Indian comes back to India he faces the same age old issue and bitches about it.